The specific protection Trump has repealed is the executive order for Fair Pay and Safe Workplaces, which President Obama signed into law in July of 2014. It required businesses to disclose any violations of federal labor law when bidding for contracts with federal agencies—thus, of course, allowing those agencies the option of turning them down. This was a big deal for women, as the law encouraged paycheck transparency and compliance with the Family Medical Leave act, among other labor protections. Republicans have called this "blacklisting," and the order had already been all but killed by a Texas federal court ruling in October 2016, which declared that the order imposed "arbitrary and unnecessary burdens" on businesses. Trump repealing it is no surprise.

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It is, however, a symptom of a deeper problem, one which has been a recurring theme throughout Trump's presidency and in his administration: policies that use "pro-business" logic to advance punitively anti-woman agendas.

For supporters of the Obama order, the law made sense; the money being given was taxpayer money, and victims of discrimination could wind up financially supporting discriminatory companies without knowing it. Indeed, the order was substantially inspired by a 2010 report from the United States Government Accountability Office, which found that 15 businesses cited for labor law violations had received over $6 billion in taxpayer funding. Nor do the "burdens" imposed by President Obama's now-deceased order seem exactly back-breaking. The mandated paycheck transparency simply prevented wage theft by requiring employers to give each worker a full account of her hours, pay, and deductions (if any) from the paycheck. It also prohibited businesses from covering up sexual harassment and assault claims through mandatory arbitration—that is, basically, a private proceeding in which the two parties' claims are reviewed and subject to a legally binding decision by a third party. Arbitration often prevents sexual harassment claims from becoming public. When included in employment contracts, "arbitration clauses" are sometimes called "cover up clauses," by critics.

Now: Before we can even get into the scumminess of mandatory arbitration, we should acknowledge the flagrant hypocrisy at hand. The GOP is not opposed on principle to "blacklisting" businesses or organizations by withholding federal funding. The GOP's entire crusade to defund Planned Parenthood is based on the idea that it is somehow morally wrong for the healthcare provider to receive federal funding because it is associated with abortion, whether any actual taxpayer funds go to the abortions or not. (They don't. The Hyde Amendment has long prohibited federal funding from going toward most abortions.) So, for the Paul Ryans and Donald Trumps of this world, it's acceptable to refuse funding on those grounds, but not on the grounds that a business has discriminatory practices or a history of female employees being sexually assaulted while on the job. The litmus test for fund-worthiness, in both cases, seems ideological rather than practical: Punishing businesses for helping women is OK, but punishing businesses for harming women is not.

That same preference for corporate convenience over women's safety was the basis for Trump SCOTUS pick Neil Gorsuch's infamous concurrence in the Hobby Lobby case, wherein he apparently agreed that Hobby Lobby—a chain of craft stores—was not only a person, but that it (she?) was a religious person, and as such was faced with the philosophical question of "what constitutes wrongful conduct" and the degree to which those who assist others in committing wrongful conduct themselves bear moral culpability." Heavy stuff for a building full of yarn. But Gorsuch concluded that Hobby Lobby—and, relatedly, the family who owned it—should not have their conscience sullied by "payments for drugs or devices that can have the effect of destroying a fertilized human egg," that is, insurance that covered birth control for female and trans employees.

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Punishing businesses for helping women is OK, but punishing businesses for harming women is not.

Granted, Gorsuch's evident beliefs that the needs of a business take precedence over the safety of its employees have more gender-neutral implications—he has, elsewhere, argued that truck drivers have a responsibility to freeze to death rather than disobey their employers. And some defenders, like Ephrat Livni, have argued that "the case doesn't hinge on the judge's position on women" and that "contraception wasn't really the question—religious freedom was." But, with respect to Livni, the questions are inseparable—or rather, there is only one question, which is whether corporations are so important that they can, in the name of "religious freedom," deprive women who work there of basic rights like healthcare.

Mandatory arbitration for sexual harassment and assault is another one of these companies-over-women quagmires. Arbitration clauses—which many workers agree to as part of their initial paperwork without even realizing it—effectively prevent employees who've been sexually harassed or assaulted from taking their claims to court, forcing them to go through an arbitration process instead. Not only do the victims get less in damages (according to a TIME report, the standard payout in an arbitrated settlement is $30,000, whereas employees who take their claims to court win an average of $217,000), the findings are not a matter of public record, as they would be in a court case. Employers can effectively break the rules over and over again, creating an environment of chronic intimidation toward female employees. Meanwhile, each woman who takes her harassment or assault claim to arbitration may believe she's the first woman to do so—especially since some arbitration clauses don't just forbid employees from taking their claims to court, but also include non-disclosure rules to prevent victims from telling anyone about the arbitration.

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Of course, you can mine all the standard bitter irony from the fact of these particular men repealing this particular set of protections. We are dealing with one of the most openly misogynist Presidential administrations in history; it really is no wonder that one of their first acts would be to make sexual harassment a little bit less risky. But these concerns—like the attacks on Planned Parenthood, or sexual harassment itself—preceded Donald Trump. They will also outlive his tenure.

What we are seeing, more than anything else, is the stark truth of how power works in a sexist society: When men run all the businesses, the interests of sexism and the interests of corporations are more or less identical. As long as sexism remains an organizing principle in our politics, women's needs will always be subordinated, to corporations or the state or both. Whether we can change that balance is up to us. Until we do, as loudly as we advocate for equal pay or equal treatment, men like Trump will be working to roll those rights back.

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